TulaneLSU's pork tenderloin scallopini

Dear Friends,

Last week Mother asked if I would host a dinner party tonight. So long as alcohol is not involved, I am never one to shy from hosting. Hospitality, I was taught from an early age, is one of the distinguishing features of a Christian. The great traveler St. Paul was often in need of good old fashioned hospitality, as he found himself shipwrecked, in foreign lands, and on the edge of arrest many times. I believe it was in a letter to Titus that he said that all church leaders need to be hospitable. A Christian who hosts must be self controlled, holy, disciplined and love the good. He must encourage others in orthodox teachings and denounce what is false.

My dinner parties and hot chocolate gatherings always begin with an hour or two of mingling and conversation in the sitting room. The sitting room and dining room are two rooms that lost favor with many Westerners in this century. The guillotine of renovation and new construction meets these communal rooms today. Jettisoned are the neatly ordered traditions of our parents, all for open concept and life without walls or laws. The problem with such a concept is this general acceptance of chaos and loss of form has profound downstream impacts on society. This so-called free and unbound society of individual liberty is nothing more than thinly veiled anarchy, which moves toward riot and lawlessness.

Once the ice is chipped by cordial conversation and hors d'oeuvres, we move to the dining room, which normally sits eight. The old oak table, though, has leaves which can extend the table to accommodate twenty diners. Mother said tonight’s dinner party would be eight, but that, due to the corpulence of one of the diners, it would be a good idea to add one leaf.

Lack of preparation of inattentiveness to detail is not something of which I am often accused. My preparations this week were thorough. Mother gave me a budget of $500 for the meal. Naturally, I went to Sam’s, where the city gets the best meats.

What I found interesting was the price of beef. Filet mignon and steak prices were normal. The minced hamburger meat, however, was outrageously priced. I saw 80/20 chuck junk in plastic tubing the size of a Grove Park Inn log for $6 per pound. Normally this lower meat runs $2.50 per pound in bulk at Sam’s. The grass fed 93/7 was $8.50 per pound. In what reasonable world can one buy sirloin steak cheaper that hamburger meat?

The pricing was so disjointed and irrational one wonders if these prices are the result of price fixing. I was so overwrought by this possibility that I decided to boycott the beef industry. I turned toward pork. As several friends here have recently discussed pork tenderloin, I decided I would buy a package.

The packages have two compartments, each with two tenderloins.Package weight ranged from four to five pounds. The price was just $2.50 per pound, making this a steal, if it is good food. Honestly, I had never tried pork tenderloin before. The world has changed in recent months, so I thought this a good opportunity to change my view on and experience with pork.

I also bought a two pound package of broccoli florets, which were $2 per pound. I prefer buying broccoli crowns, as I like eating the large stem and I save about 40 cents per pound, but I was unable to make a trip to regal Walmart this week, where crowns are sold.

With about $485 left in the budget, I decided the rest of the money with best be spent on flowers. So I purchased most of the Sam’s floral inventory. Great restaurants long ago realized that flowers on a table are show stoppers and add to the diner’s overall experience. I spent most of this morning arranging and by this afternoon, my six hours of labor produced a floral garden in the dining room that even Gregor Lersch might compliment.

Having never eaten or cooked pork tenderloin, I thought it best to examine the meat, and smell it. Nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu was my guiding principle. But I then remembered I am an Augustinian, not a Thomist, and dropped in prayer for revelation. Only then would I know what type of recipe I would like to use. These things I did and I decided a suitable option for this beautiful meat was to incorporate it in a scallopini dish. First things first, I will start with the ten ingredients:



1. Pork tenderloin (I used two, approximately 1.5 pounds and 1 pound each)
2. Great Value brand thin spaghetti
3. Michael’s of Brooklyn red sauce. I also had some 4. Lidia’s, that I ended up not using.
4. Frances Mayes’ olive oil. It is the best olive oil available in America. I used to get it through Dean & DeLuca.
5. Great Value brand lemon juice from concentrate.
6. Garlic, minced.
7. Great Value brand Italian seasonings (basil, oregano, rosemary, and thyme).
8. Garlic salt.
9. Meat hammer.
10. Ear defenders.